Without warning, our station’s Twitter account that pushes Spinitron spins as they happen was “permanently suspended” because it “broke the Twitter Rules.”
We only use this account to post spins, so I have no idea why this occurred and did not get any email or notice from Twitter in advance of our ban.
It stopped working on March 15th.
Have any other stations reported something similar?
The account is (was?) https://twitter.com/wprbot.
Yrs,
Jon Solomon 103.3 fm WPRB
Hi Jon! We don’t have one set up here at WLFR, but my former station still has an active Twitter account. This is just a guess, but I wonder if Twitter flagged it because the handle has bot in it? With everything going on in Twitter HQ, I wouldn’t be surprised. I wonder if it would flag any new account made to do the same.
I’m still very slowly working on getting WLFR running on Spinitron & have some fundraising to do as well. So far, the response has been positive, but mid-semester (almost near the end of it in reality) was probably not the best time to try and launch new things!
I wish you luck in sorting out the Twitter issue!
Lauree WLFR 91.7FM
Thanks, Lauree. Always good to hear from you! This “bot” theory did cross my mind but I’m not going to ajust the account name (and probably can’t change the handle) until I get some sort of response to my appeal…
I had the exact same thought about that hot-button word that starts with a bee and ends with a tea.
Let us know what happens with the appeal.
Hi everyone, the same thing happened to my account-- sadly only a day after setting it up! I appealed with a lengthy explanation about what it is, why we use it, who we are, how it can support the artists we play, etc. They reviewed my appeal and told me the account was permanently suspended. Dang! If anyone has a different suggestion let me know.
p.s. my account didn’t have the word “bot” anywhere, but I imagine they picked up on the spinitron “bot” sending out tweets and flagged it
I’m sorry to hear it because this is starting to look like a pattern.
Automatically tweeting a spin every few minutes doesn’t represent what I imagine as the kind of user behavior that Twitter might want to encourage and I can imagine how Twitter might decide that it’s not acceptable.
When we implemented the feature it was a fun gimmick but I had to warn stations to not use their main Twitter account and instead to set up a special one just for Spinitron to use. With a robotic tweet every few minutes listeners will quickly unfollow you if you push them with your main feed. This fact in itself indicates how contrived the thing is.
There is a danger that Twitter will suddenly shut all of the feeds from Spinitron. They just need to connect the source of the push requests to Spinitron to our documentation of the feature and then find the Twitter accounts being fed by it.
So I fear we may be facing losing these feeds to Twitter one-by-one as time goes, or many/all at once, or possibly the one followed by the other.
:(